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Video Transcript

First of all, what is curated content? Essentially, it’s the collation of particularly authoritative and useful pieces of content into one comprehensive guide, that will help your readers, on a particular topic. What are the benefits? First of all, authority. You will be seen as an expert in that particular area, because you are able to filter through what’s frankly millions of pieces of content uploaded online every day, to find the really useful stuff that’s going to help people out.

Outreach. When you create curated content, you are going to be linking out to the original sources. That is really useful for when you are trying to promote the piece of content, because it means that you can go to the authors of the original source, and let them know that you’ve mentioned them. Then they could potentially send it to their followers; which increases its potential reach quite a bit.

Time. Believe it or not, curated content can actually save you quite a bit of time. This is because you’re not reinventing the wheel. You’re basically bringing together resources that already exist. You are, of course, adding value and structuring the piece, and not copying and pasting. But you are still able to save a significant amount of time rather than creating completely original content. I’ll show you a couple of tools that will help you with saving time, as well.

So, how? Plan your topic, that’s the first thing you need to do. You need to do a bit of research into what’s going to be the most valuable topic to look at. Again, I’ll give you a few ideas on how to come up with that topic, a bit later in the video. But you really want to be looking at the stuff that’s going to be really valuable and there’s going to be some content out there about it already, obviously. But if it’s a topic that’s been covered quite a lot and has also been covered by other curators, then it’s not going to really be the most beneficial.

Next, is to do the actual research, finding the content sources that you want to include. Then, you’re going to be adding your value. Like I said, you need to be looking at adding your own opinion, adding your thoughts on the original piece, but also any additional information that you can provide as well.

Last of all, under the ‘how’ I’ve got content types. You don’t just want to be looking at sharing lots of blog posts. You want to mix it up a bit. You want to include some infographics, videos, slide-shares, that sort of thing, just so it’s a bit more dynamic.

Next – tools. These will help you out when you’re curating your content. First of all, bookmarking. When you come across a particularly good article, you want to be able to save it. There’s different sites like StumbleUpon, which will help you with your bookmarking. So, I’d highly recommend using a site like that, because it allows you to categorise the pieces of content that you are bookmarking. This will be really useful to you when you come back, and you are putting together the curated content.

Next, RSS feeds. Sites like Feedly.com can be really useful. They’re RSS feeds that let you add content onto them at different blogs, that sort of thing, so that you can keep an eye on how that topic is being discussed. Next, we have BuzzSumo. At the time of recording, BuzzSumo is currently in its Beta stage, but it does have this brilliant top content search tool that lets you type in a particular topic, and then you can search, and it will show you a long list of particularly authoritative pieces that are usually ranked by the amount of social shares they’ve had. So you know that they’ve had a lot of engagement.

Finally, ideas. So, one idea for your curated content is to ask industry experts questions around the topic, their thoughts and opinions, or if they’ve got any particular tips or advice on a particular issue. So, we’ve done this a couple of times here at Koozai. We asked actual industry experts what their thoughts are on say, new trends in digital.

Next, follower input. You want to look at perhaps asking your customers, what they want to read about, what they need more information about. There’s no harm in asking people what they want to find out.

Finally, industry trends. So, whatever’s hot, whatever news is interesting in your industry currently, particularly anything that people might be a bit confused or unsure about. If you can be that thought leader that brings all together the best stuff to present to your audience, then that’s brilliant news.

That’s it, using curated content in your content strategy. If you’d like to follow Koozai you can have a look at the social profiles after this video, and I’ll be seeing you soon. Thanks.

Cat worked as a Content Marketing Executive at Koozai. Having studied an NCTJ accredited course at University, she has gained valuable skills in creative copywriting, press communications and research. She is an avid blogger and has a keen interest in popular culture and technologies.

That’s a great example – it’s unlikely that people, especially those who have only just invested in a slow cooker, to only be looking for a single recipe. People like to have choice, and I think this is one of the many reasons curated content can work well in all sorts of industries.

Expert interviews are great because they do allow for more ‘unique’ curated content – their quotes, in most cases, will be unique to that particular piece of content so there’s real value in that.